August 2014

This week, to celebrate the launch of Switched on Science Second Edition, we're giving away a free topic from Year 1 in which pupils explore their local environment to help them find out more about the plants and animals that live in their locality.

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Attacking a question in this way makes the learning more active and enables children to view assessment as an exciting experience that can help them progress.

Thanks to John Dabell for the following article.

Have you ever tried scrunched up or crumpled assessment before?

This is a tried and tested strategy for self, peer and whole-class assessment and gives children the chance to make their ideas visible in an active and exciting context. It facilitates knowledge and understanding upgrades and helps the class to work as a team of learners.

Crumpled assessment is a very engaging way to get a snapshot of the ideas and explanations children hold and you can use the information to design and provide targeted learning opportunities for conceptual change.

 

 

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Sue Evans, science coordinator at Phoenix Primary, details a fun outdoor activity for you to try with your pupils. Get them running around neighing like horses or baaing like sheep whilst also learning how to identify a variety of common animals that are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores.

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The last thing we want is for resources and teaching to actually support misconceptions and overgeneralisations but this happens. If you have a classroom poster showing maths shapes then take a good look at it. Can you spot any errors? Are there any shapes that have been mislabelled? Read more »

As we prepare for the new academic year, the importance of the curriculum has come into sharper focus. Nick Hart explains the significance of designing a maths curicculum that is specific to the issues of your pupils. Read more »

James Pembroke is the founder of the school data company, Sig+, and he’s written this very handy article to help Multi Academy Trusts make sense of their data.  

What are the benefits and risks of data collection in MATs?

Due to the nature of MATs, there’s a wide range of expertise that can be utilised to develop effective, common approaches to assessment. Decision makers are more well informed, so they can direct resources to where they’re most needed, and large numbers of pupils mean more reliable, meaningful data. The risk of data collection, though, is that it might lead to a top down, accountability-focused system of assessment that increases workload but doesn’t have much of an impact on learning. So, how can we make sense of all this data, and put it to good use?

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It has been ten years since the KS2 test included poetry (cast your minds back to the themed ‘Rain & Shine’ reading booklet in 2008 where pupils were presented two poems related to rain) so were you and your colleagues surprised to open the reading booklet this year to find a poem?

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We asked Shareen Mayers to share her thoughts and initial reactions to the 2018 KS2 grammar, punctuation and spelling test…

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